I Love You More: A Novel (23 page)

“Oh, me too. It’s cold out there.”

There was a table next to the front door with a lamp and some pictures on it; I picked one up. “Interesting,” I said. “Where was this taken?”

“At our church. Trinity Lutheran. Why?”

“Diana Lane and Julie Lane have very similar ones in their homes. All of them seem to have been taken around the same time. A coincidence, don’t you think?”

Roberta Miles’s smile was condescending. “Really, Detective. You’re obviously more astute than that. There’s nothing coincidental about it, now is there? We all had the same husband, remember?”

I replaced the picture. “Oh, just one more thing.”

“What’s that, Detective?”

“Did you ever see your husband with an unidentifiable key?”

“A key?” she said. “Oh, thank God. You found out about him. He told me to stay out of that room, but I just couldn’t control myself. It’s full of all his previous wives. Hanging from the rafters, chopped up, you name it. If he hadn’t died, I could’ve been next.”

“Funny,” I said. “I’m guessing that’s a no.”

Like she had on our first visit, she stood by the door as we walked to our car.

“What was that about?” Mack asked as he pulled away from the curb.

“Bluebeard,” I said. “It’s a fairy tale. Guy kills all his wives, leaves their bodies in a secret room, and sets up subsequent wives to find them before he kills them too.”

“That’s a fairy tale? Don’t think I’ll be reading it to Evan.”

“Good idea,” I said.

“Speaking of fairy tales,” Mack said. “What do you think? Wolf in sheep’s clothing?”

“Definitely more to her than I first thought,” I said.

“What do you make of her saying they couldn’t afford one of those paintings? And she looked pretty surprised when you mentioned the one in Julie Lane’s house.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bit of friction there. But I think it’s more to do with him being a liar. She’s probably seeing that more and more, and each discovery stings. Roberta Miles isn’t the flashy type;
she’s careful with her money. She wouldn’t have been interested in a man who squandered money on fine art. He probably told her some story about growing up dirt poor and working his way up that he thought would impress her.”

“Interesting that she said the surveillance tapes wouldn’t incriminate her,” Mack said. “Do you think they checked the place for cameras before they decided to eat there?”

“No,” I said. “She knew we were playing her.”

What I didn’t say was that I thought Roberta Miles had some kind of psychic ability. Nor did I say that of the three of them, I was pretty certain she’d be the hardest to crack—though I’d thought the exact opposite at first.

That night, like I’d been doing since my mother died, I walked into a house so empty it echoed. Maybe it wasn’t dank and filthy like my apartment in Detroit, but it was just as spare, just as depressing: cold wood floors, empty fridge, bare cupboards, blank walls, fireplace that hadn’t seen a piece of wood in nearly a year. My rickety table and chairs had moved with me. I took off my suit coat, hung it over a chair, went to my liquor shelf, grabbed my trusty bottle of Redbreast and a shot glass, and drank one after another while I paged through the book Roberta Miles gave me, my flash cards waiting patiently for that magical moment when just the right amount of scotch rendered me brilliant. But I didn’t find the sweet spot that night; I never even got to the cards. At some point I must’ve dozed off, or entered some sort of dark fairyland, because one of Julian Schnabel’s paintings was fucking with my mind. The plates were crashing against my skull, shattering, piercing my brain, while the damn words just curled their way through them, undaunted, unharmed.

Beautiful, lucky, sorry, gun, motive, liar, dumb ass, wives, guilty as sin
.

Destiny
: the hidden power believed to control what will happen in the future; fate.

Smart
: having or showing intelligence; capable of independent and intelligent action.

Ever since I was a little girl, people said I was smart. Daddy started it. He told me that a lot of parents think their kids are smart when they do stuff for the first time, like roll over, sit up, talk, walk, or read those stupid flash cards, especially if they do it before all the other kids their age.

“Did I do all those things before other kids?” I’d asked.

“No,” he said. “And that’s how I knew you were smart.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You might not have done things first, but you did them all at once. You never crawled. You never took a few steps and fell. One day you just up and walked across the room, smiling and laughing the whole time, like your mama and I were idiots to have worried. Don’t you see? You waited. For just the right moment.”

I wasn’t surprised when Detective Kennedy showed up with Detective Jones not even a week after he’d been rifling through Daddy’s car, but I was worried. Detective Kennedy had been coming around with “one more question” for a while by then, but I
could tell there was going to be a lot more than one question this time. I remember thinking that since I’m so smart shouldn’t I be able to figure out some way to stop Mama from getting arrested, and consequently me from going to foster care? Then I started thinking about destiny and how sometimes even when you try to make something not happen, it still happens. Just like Daddy dying.

Mama sent me to my room, which was no surprise, but if she were paying any attention at all, she would’ve noticed that the wood floor was a bit more worn around the corner from the top stair. By then I was an expert eavesdropper. Mama wasn’t paying much attention to anything. I could swear in front of her, which I sometimes did just to see, and she wouldn’t even notice. Life with Mama had become a string of “That’s nice, Picasso”s or “What did you say, Picasso”s. I could’ve been planning to jump off a roof, rob a bank, or even run away from home to live with wild monkeys and she wouldn’t have known, or cared.

While Detective Jones asked Mama a million questions about some restaurant near some church, I was thinking about how upset Mama surely was that they had stopped by unannounced. Mama hated when people didn’t call first; it wasn’t polite. Losing your privacy was obviously one of the side effects of someone dying. There were a bunch more. Like sometimes I actually forgot that Daddy was dead. I expected to hear him showering in the morning. I swore I heard him calling my name, or I’d hear the mailman’s heavy boots on the front-porch steps and get that excited feeling that starts in your chest and washes over your entire body. Sometimes I even ran to the door. What was really weird was that I saw him everywhere, like at the grocery or drugstore. He’d disappear around a corner, and sometimes I’d drop whatever I was in the middle of doing and scurry after him, but it wasn’t him. It was some other kid’s dad. Then there was all the practical stuff. Like for the longest time, Mama and I lived
in the dark. I don’t mean dark in the metaphorical sense. I mean burned-out lightbulbs didn’t get replaced. We also lived in
squalor
(a state of being extremely dirty). The trash just sat there in the kitchen until it spilled over the wastebasket, and same thing with the garbage can outside. The yard didn’t get mowed. The bushes grew long, wiry tentacles. Ivy about choked the life out of the tree in our front yard. A bunch of dry sticks with crispy leaves stuck out of flower beds and flowerpots. The point is, before Daddy died, I didn’t understand about maintenance; I didn’t even know it was happening. It was just always done. Someone’s dying was bad enough, but when you stack all those other unexpected things on top of it, it pretty much sucked. That’s what Ryan Anderson said anyway. Well, what he actually said was “Life sucks”—he was upset about losing a soccer game—but I told him I figured death sucked more.

“You were in Research Triangle Park for some sort of meeting that day, weren’t you, ma’am?” Detective Jones was asking. Detective Kennedy hadn’t said one thing, at least that I heard. I figured that was because he liked Mama.

“A Junior League state chapter meeting,” Mama said. “But I don’t remember going to that particular restaurant.”

“The waitress will testify that she saw the three of you together that day,” Detective Jones said. “And she’s a pretty credible witness. Prelaw student at UNC.”

“She’s mistaken,” Mama said. “I’ve never met my husband’s other wives.”

“Where have I heard those words before?” Detective Jones asked. “Oh yeah, Roberta Miles, or was it Julie Lane, or both? Well, we’ll know soon enough who was or wasn’t there. We’re waiting on the restaurant’s surveillance tapes.”

Surveillance tapes? Like from a camera?

That was it. Foster care was my destiny. Although I didn’t know too much about foster care back then, I did know from watching
TV that I would most likely go live in some big old drafty house with a bunch of other parentless kids, many of whom took drugs that numbed their brains, and a so-called mom and dad who really didn’t care about me or the other kids, only the money they got for taking us in. I remember thinking that I would probably end up living at a house like that forever, or until they threw me out, because nobody wants to adopt older children, and there was a good chance I’d end up using drugs too, or even worse I could end up a prostitute, and Ryan Anderson would definitely not like me if I were a prostitute.

“I’m certain the tapes will show that I wasn’t there,” Mama said.

“Really?” Detective Jones asked. “Why is that?”

“Because I wasn’t,” Mama said.

I didn’t know for sure, but I figured that was a big fat lie.

After Detective Kennedy and Detective Jones left, I wandered downstairs. Mama was sitting at the dining-room table with her head down and her hands rubbing her forehead.

“Are you okay, Mama?” I asked. She didn’t say anything, so I added, “What was Detective Kennedy doing here?” I’d learned it was good to pretend I didn’t know what I knew, partially because it didn’t do much good (Mama had never even once brought up the Don’t Kill Daddy conversation we sort of had) and partially because there was the outside chance she might actually answer me truthfully.

“He just wanted to update me on the case,” Mama said, which wasn’t the whole truth but surprised me anyway. I mean at least she was present.

“Do they know who killed Daddy?” I asked.

Mama straightened, looked at me. “No.”

“That’s good,” I said.

She cocked her head, furrowed the skin above her eyebrows. “Why do you think that’s good?”

The question put me in a pickle, so I had to think for a while
about a response that would get me out of it. “Because once they find who killed him, we won’t see Detective Kennedy anymore.”

“There is that,” Mama said, and she actually smiled.

“Have you called anyone since they left?” I asked.

More wrinkling. “Why would I call someone?” Another unexpected question. Had Mama finally woken up from her alien-inhabited state?

Again, I had to make something up. “I thought you said something earlier about having to call someone about Junior League stuff.”

“Did I?” she asked, her eyes staring off into space again. And then she said something that scared the bejesus out of me. “You’ll be okay if anything ever happens to me, won’t you Picasso? You’re a very smart girl, and very strong.”

I remember I was just getting ready to say something like “No, I won’t be okay, Mama,” or “I’m not as smart or strong as you think I am, Mama,” or, what I wanted to say most of all, “Please don’t leave me, Mama,” when she just got up from her chair, walked toward the living room, and without even looking back at me, turned and headed upstairs.

I admit I was relieved when the restaurant sighting turned out to be a dead end. Lindsay Middleton, poor thing, called several times to follow up on our progress.

“I know it was them,” she kept saying.

“We believe you,” I’d say. “But unfortunately it’s your word against theirs.”

She ended her last call by saying, “I’m very disappointed in our country’s judicial system.” The click sounded louder than I’m sure it was. I wondered whether she’d stick with prelaw.